When as Christians we have been overwhelms by God’s majesty and have learned to rejoice in the forgiveness of sins, we will soon realise, like Isaiah, that God has work for us to do:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ Isa. 6:8

For the Christian there can be no hesi­tation, no negotiation, no discussion or argument. Isaiah was ready to go. Sovereign grace constrained him to sur­render his will to God’s will, and thus to commit his whole life to the service of God. It was not an easy mission. God was sending him to preach judgment to peo­ple who would neither listen nor repent.

He said,

Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving’.Isa. 6:9

By conventional standards, Isaiah was destined to become a failed prophet, a spectacularly unsuccessful evangelist. But he did not try to bargain for a better job offer. All he said was, “For how long, O Lord?” (Isa. 6:11). Such submission is the mark of someone who has embraced the doctrines of grace.

This submission also comes to charac­terise the Christian’s entire experience. What is a true Calvinist? B. B. Warfield insisted that true Calvinists are,

humble souls, who, in the quiet of retired lives, have caught a vision of God in His glory and are cherishing in their hearts that vital flame of complete dependence on Him which is the very essence of Calvinism.

One way true Calvinists demonstrate the complete dependence of a sub­missive will is by making a commitment to the life of prayer. It is sometimes thought that God’s sovereignty inhibits prayer. If God has already decided what He is going to do, the argument goes, and there is nothing that we can do to change what He has planned from all maternity, then why should we pray? It won’t make any difference anyway, so why bother?

The flaw in this argument should imme­diately be evident to anyone who knows the Lord’s Prayer, for Jesus taught us to pray, “Your will be done” (Mt. 6:10). In prayer we surrender our will to God’s will. Prayer is not a way of getting God to do what we want Him to do; rather, it is a way of submitting to God’s will in all things.

Furthermore, the sovereignty of God proves to be absolutely essential to the efficacy of prayer, for only a sovereign God has the power to answer! This is why it is sometimes said that when they are on their knees, all Christians are Calvinists. True prayer is prostration before the sov­ereignty of God, and Calvinism simply maintains this posture all through life.

To quote again from B. B. Warfield,

The Calvinist is the man who is deter­mined to preserve the attitude he takes in prayer in all his thinking, in all his feeling, in all his doing ... Other men are Calvinists on their knees; the Calvinist is the man who is determined that his intel­lect, and heart, and will shall remain on their knees continually, and only from this attitude think, and feel and act.

One way to test the claim that every Christian is a Calvinist at prayer is to con­sider how believers pray for the uncon­verted. Imagine for a moment that God is not sovereign in grace, that salvation ulti­mately depends on the sinner’s own choice. How then should we pray? Do we say: “Dear Lord, I realise that there may not be much that you can do about this, but if there is, please help my friend some­how to become a Christian”? Of course, the idea that anyone prays this way is absurd. But what makes it so absurd is that, deep down, every Christian believes in the sovereignty of God’s grace. When we pray for sinners to be converted, there­fore, we ask God to do something for them that we know they are utterly inca­pable of doing for themselves. We ask God to invade their minds, change their hearts, and bend their wills so that they will come to him in faith and repentance. In short, in our intercession we depend on God to save them.

This attitude of dependence ought to characterise the Christian’s entire approach to evangelism. True evangelism is entirely dependent on God for its suc­cess. The regeneration of the sinner’s mind and heart is the work of God’s Spirit. It does not depend on saying the right words or using the most effective technique. The true Calvinist surrenders to God’s will in sharing the gospel, because God’s sovereignty in grace gives the only hope of success.

James Packer writes:

In evangelism ... we are impotent; we depend wholly upon God to make our witness effective; only because He is able to give men new hearts can we hope that through our preaching of the gospel sinners will be born again. These facts ought to drive us to prayer.

A good example of an evangelist who submitted to God’s will is the apostle Paul. No one was more committed to the doctrines of grace than Paul. At the same time, no one was more committed to prayer and evangelism. Paul did not assume that because God is sovereign in grace, therefore prayer is unnecessary. On the contrary, he understood that since salvation is entirely due to God’s grace, for that reason prayer is absolutely essential. Those who believe most strongly in the sovereignty of grace ought to be most persistent in asking God to do what only he can do, and that is to save sinners.